Bee-bee-beeeee

He’s one of those kids that people (myself included, I’m embarrassed to say) inevitably describe as being “in their own world.”* But that’s not true at all. Better to say that he perceives and interacts with the same world we do… he just does so very differently than most of us. We don’t “speak” the same mental language, and many things that most people take for granted just aren’t on his radar. I suspect that plenty of things that are obvious to him pass us by completely, too. He doesn’t often make eye contact, rarely looks at something that someone is pointing at. He doesn’t do social smiles, or acknowledge when people arrive or leave, or have any verbal language. It’s hard to remember sometimes that he’s actually very observant and quite clever.

He’s a musical kid. Hums a lot, whistles better than I do, and does some reasonably good bird calls. He vocalizes a fair bit, especially when happy or excited. But he doesn’t use many speech sounds, and almost no consonants. With one exception. One of his happy verbal stims goes something like this: “bee-bee-bee bee-buh-bee…”

I wondered about this for a while. Why “bee?” Granted, “B” it is one of the early consonant sounds babies learn, but usually after “Mama,” at least, and it’s usually “Bah” rather than “Bee.” “Gah” and “Dah” are also learned early, but I’ve never heard him say either of those. When the most likely answer finally popped into my mind, I couldn’t believe it took so long for the idea to occur to me.

See, he’s from a multilingual household, and the most commonly spoken language at home is… Arabic. Where the standard term of endearment is “habibi” (ha-bee-bee), which means “beloved.” His parents and grandparents and so on use his name as well, of course, but very often he is addressed as “habibi,” especially when people are happy with him.

It’s wonderfully endearing to me that, out of all the things he hears on a daily basis, this is the one he has chosen (consciously or not) to mimic. Maybe it’s his way of saying “I love you” back to his mother, to his family, to the world. I don’t know. But it sounds even more joyful now that I know its origins.

Good luck telling many special ed officials about language differences in learning. Many of them would still act as though it is a developmental delay, due to a combination of ableism, racism, and colonialist attitudes (the latter of which are applied to both racism and ableism)